AVE, MARIA
Jane Maunder visits the Tasmanian island that refuses to be tamed
It may be Australia’s smallest state, but the southern island of Tasmania has a big reputation for isolated wilderness escapes — often despite Europeans’ best efforts to tame it, as is the case with Maria Island.
Nearly 200 years ago, the British established a convict settlement on these 11,500ha in the Tasman Sea. That failure, now a Unesco World Heritage site, was followed by farms and an Italian entrepreneur’s follies. All are now historic relics, often ruins, on this island national park where people are but fleeting visitors, vastly outnumbered by wildlife.
There are no shops or eateries on Maria Island, and the only wheels beside the park ranger’s vehicle are rented and BYO bicycles. Accommodation is your tent, or the relative comfort of bunk beds in the old Darlington settlement’s convict quarters. Without access to private boat or plane, the only way on or off is a 30-minute ferry crossing from Tasmania’s east coast.
It’s the regular Encounter Maria Island passenger ferry for me on a grey day that makes the need for self-sufficiency all the more apparent. Approaching the island that local Aboriginal people have for millennia known as wukaluwikiwayna, what first catches the eye are concrete silos, sticking out like four sore thumbs on a low, barely vegetated stretch of Maria’s varied coastline.
They are remnants of enterprising migrant Diego Bernacchi’s last hurrah: a 1920s cement works. It fizzled, just like his schemes to produce everything from wine to silk on the island over the previous four decades, and attempts to turn it into a tourist destination by building the Coffee Palace and Grand Hotel.
After I disembark, the silos are soon forgotten as I’m drawn to a more promising structure nearby: the convict settlement’s 1825 Commissariat Store, a double-storey stone building of honest Georgian design that’s now the national park’s visitor centre. Informed and oriented, I head for Fossil Cliffs, following one of the three Tasmanian 60 Great Short Walks on Maria Island.
The easy two-hour circuit begins on grassland scattered with the red bricks of tumbledown ruins, flowering plants introduced long ago, and wombats grazing like contented Antipodean sheep. This scene gives way to eucalypt forest, in which the shell of Signore Bernacchi’s engine house endures, before the sky dramatically opens up again as the island plunges into the sea.
I’m standing on 100m-high cliffs, which curve around Cape Boullanger, forming part of a panoramic view that includes the nearby island of Ile du Nord (yes, French explorers came here too) and the Tasmanian mainland beyond. Even in the persistent grey gloom, it’s a grand sight powered by raw nature.
Stairs lead to the rocky beach below, where history and nature embrace. Fossil Cliffs lives up to the name: countless 300-million-year-old clams, sea fans, corals, scallop shells and sea lilies are embedded in this wild gallery wall, and also littered about due to past limestone quarrying. Big Cape Barren geese look on — mostly at themselves in rainwater puddles.
Walking along the coast, I pass kangaroos grazing in formation on the island’s grass airfield, desolate farm buildings and equipment, and a poignant little cemetery before ambling into Darlington, Australia’s most intact convict probation station.
It’s an orderly handful of humble buildings from different eras, including the original 1825 convict settlement, abandoned seven years later, and another short-lived attempt at making crime pay by putting convicts to work that began in 1842. There’s also the 1888 Coffee Palace. A self-guided stroll through this restored place of refreshment suggests Bernacchi oversold his “palace“.
Those with the necessary time or equipment can visit long-abandoned Frenchs Farm and Encampment Cove’s convict ruins further afield, go sea-kayaking and snorkelling in the island’s marine reserve, or tackle the long-ish walk to the towering twin dolerite peaks of Bishop and Clerk. However, I must board the day’s final ferry, so head off on an easy two-hour walk to the seaside Painted Cliffs.
It’s best at low tide — check — in the afternoon, when sunshine lights up the aptly named cliffs. Almost on cue, the sun makes its first fortuitous appearance of the day soon after I arrive, slack-jawed, at this geological work of art. Swirling strata of cream and ochre-hued limestone, eroded into audaciously curvy shapes by wind and waves, take on deeper shade and a more golden glow in this brighter light. The Painted Cliffs are on a human scale, inviting visitors to look closely at its mesmerising patterns.
Eventually, reluctantly, I walk back slightly inland, past abundant eucalypts and sporadic human heritage: here a tumbledown red-brick oast house, where hops were dried; there an extremely basic Depression-era worker’s dwelling of corrugated iron and newspaper. A kangaroo bounces by, oblivious to these structures fading into history on an island that refuses to be tamed.